Same Old, Same Old

I am in the first year of serving on the board at my local golf club and one of the members came up to me the other day and asked me how my year had been on the board and more specifically what had the board accomplished? As I told him the issues that we had been dealing with he said "same old, same old, nothing ever changes."  As I got to thinking about that later I started thinking about some of the things we had worked on including decreasing membership and financial strains and realized that these are certainly some of the same issues and challenges that every business that I work with faces, only it's customers instead of members. We had embarked on a membership drive and brought in about 30 new trial members, unfortunately our focus was so driven in areas of cost control that we forgot about creating an experience for those trial members that made it so they wanted to maintain their memberships after the trial period was up, no different than a business trying to bring in and keep new customers. As many businesses do, we lost focus on delivering a great customer experience and were so focused on the ultimate bottom line results that we didn't deliver enough to keep many of these trial members. I would challenge our board and committees just as I challenge the businesses I work with to deliver a great customer experience so that you keep your members or customers. It is much easier to grow your business through existing customers versus constantly trying to get new customers.  Delivering a great customer experience doesn't necessarily have to cost a great deal of money, service is one way to deliver a great experience, at our club the service levels had dropped and it was believed that is was because of cost cuts, when in reality it was a whole approach to delivering great service that had changed and there was no expectations that great service should always be delivered. Creating a "wow" customer experience is something that every business needs to focus on not only to keep it's existing customers but to create "word of mouth" marketing to attract new customers. As I am writing this blog our financial markets are in turmoil and I read an interesting editorial on the plane today talking about how the financial services industry had a "herd mentality" down this path to problems. I also believe that they and the federal government completely lost their focus on their customers; they were so driven by bottom line results and greed that they lost focus on the customer and now it is costing them and all of us dearly.  Every business whether it's my golf club or a financial services company must think about delivering to the customer an experience that first and foremost keeps them being a customer and second drives more revenue and through the experience brings in more customers. As you look at your business remember that there is only 3 ways to grow a business; more customers, more sales from existing customers and larger sales from existing customers and the latter two are by far and away the most profitable.